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I recently stopped taking one of my drugs that my shrink has actually been trying to get me off of for some time now. I’m not now entirely sure why I was so resistant, in hindsight. When I first started taking it, I think it was doing me some good. But after a while, it had the effect of laying a thick layer of cobweb over everything in my life, inside and out. I didn’t notice it at the time because there were other forces in my life that were essentially doing the same thing. So it was kind of a double whammy, mentally.

I don’t remember exactly when I started taking this particular drug, but I’m willing to guess it was around four years ago, because that’s when all of my online activity that amounted to anything more than a Facebook post came to a screeching halt. I just didn’t have anything to say anymore. I was mute. I thought it was just a result of the bipolar disorder or the OCD or PTSD or anything else that is wrong with my brain. And I do think those things have a muting effect on me. But not to this extent. What had been an annoyance had turned into a serious problem.

I couldn’t meditate anymore because I couldn’t focus or concentrate, both of which you actually need to “empty your mind”. I didn’t write anymore or go anywhere because I didn’t have anything to say. All I could do was parrot back whatever was on my Facebook feed, I’m sure to the annoyance of my friends. I know I got unfollowed by at least a few people because all I was doing was echoing the background noise of the social network without really adding anything to it. I didn’t do art anymore because I had absolutely zero desire or passion to create anything (still working on that one: I’m hopeful it will come back).

So I spent four years reading Facebook, reading the news, reading Wikipedia, or watching a tv show or movie. After about a year, I stopped getting dressed. I just stayed in my robe all day. I didn’t see the point of getting dressed if I wasn’t going anywhere. If I was going to be numb, I was going to be comfortably so. I grew to accept my fate, that I would just live out my days on social media and watching tv and movies until I either keeled over at home or had to be wheeled into a nursing home.

Then I ran out of that drug, and I didn’t feel particularly bothered to refill it for a couple of weeks. Around that same time, I began to realize I didn’t feel DEAD inside. I was enjoying my shows more, actually engaging with them rather than just using them as a way to fill the time until I could go to sleep again. I was also less likely to doze off while watching said shows and movies. I got it refilled, but I decided not to take it unless I was having what I call a “hamster wheel” day, which is when thoughts get trapped and just go around and around like hamsters on a wheel. It doesn’t happen very often and it’s not like anything bad happens when it does, but it’s an unpleasant state of mind, the brakes upon which can be applied with judicious use of the right drugs.

I guess about a week ago, I became more interested in Facebook again. I hadn’t really been on in quite some time: I had been watching tv shows and movies almost non-stop from the time I woke up until I fell asleep for months on end. It was just suddenly much more interesting to me than it had been in a long time. I started posting again. Not just reposting stuff from other people and groups, but making longer posts of my own about my own life, not someone else’s. I felt like interacting again, though not quite enough to get out for parties and social gatherings. I’ll get there, though. I am still a hermit at heart, after all.

I really don’t know what happened. It’s like a switch flipped in my head. I feel like writing again, which means I actually have something to say, which means my brain is working again after having been in standby mode for the last four years, or longer: I’ve been taking this class of drug since 2011. I restarted my blog and renamed it and made a Twitter account to go with it and a Facebook group. Buddhism is interesting to me again. I had some “a-ha!” moments while reading, of all things, the blog of a Christian pastor over the New Year holiday. A bunch of things clicked and I suddenly no longer felt the need to be seething in anger at the election of DT (I will not call him “President”, nor will I say his full name: he’s just “DT”). Not that anger is inherently bad or anything. It’s an excellent motivator. So I’m going to stay at least offended by the presence of this narcissistic child in the house recently occupied by someone who is everything DT is not. But I refuse to allow myself to be filled with hate. It’s unproductive. In fact, it’s counterproductive. But that’s another post.

I’m glad my bipolar disorder and other issues aren’t so severe anymore, such that I don’t need such intense medication anymore. Now that I have this stuff out of my system, I can get back to a mindfulness and meditative practice, both of which were two of many things that just came to a screeching halt in the last few years, which was a pity because of all of the lifestyle changes I had been trying to make, those were the most likely to help me. I’m not condemning these medications. They’re life-saving for a lot of people. And when I was first given them, I was led to believe I needed them, and maybe I did. But I don’t anymore, and unless something drastic changes with my mental health, I will never take them again. I still have other meds I have to take, so it’s not like I’m ignorant of my mental health. I’m just a lot more questioning of what is asked of me by my healthcare professionals. They may be general experts in their fields, but I am the ONLY expert on this particular body and mind. I know a lot more about them now and I’ll be sure to take that knowledge with me whenever I have to deal with healthcare workers in the future.

Like this:

2014 was largely uneventful for me. Which is good. I like quiet and uneventful. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t a good year: it was. My husband’s job got reorganized and in the process he got a raise and the ability to work from home. Which was a good thing, because I quit my job at the end of March. And thank heavens. I didn’t realize how much I was disliking my job until I quit and didn’t have to do it anymore. My position had evolved from that of a very simple clerk to a part-time office manager, amongst other things. I was the only employee and as such had to wear a lot of hats. It got to be too much stress for me after a while. The position just became too complicated over time. So it was time for me to move on. Unfortunately I didn’t do so in time to not have stressful feelings about the dojo, which means I haven’t been to class since I quit. It was a mistake to have my boss be my karate instructor. Now I can’t separate out my feelings about her two roles in my life. She was difficult to work for, but because of our relationship, neither of us felt comfortable addressing any troubles. It led to tears and bad feelings after a while. Which is unfortunate. One of the reasons I wanted to quit was so that my training wouldn’t be affected. It seems I was too late on that front.

And that was the big event of my year. Which on the one hand sounds a little sad, but on the other hand, like I said, I like quiet. Quiet is good. It’s given me the chance to get my mental health in order, for the most part. I had some episodes over the summer, but I recovered from them quickly. Overall I feel better than I have in quite some time. I seem to have a good med regimen going. I sometimes don’t want to get out of bed, but it’s not because I’m depressed. I’m mostly bored. An unfortunate side effect of my meds and of being down for so long is that my creativity has been sapped. I have a lot of free time on my hands that I could be using to do any number of creative pursuits, but I’m not. I find being creative incredibly difficult. This is a common problem for bipolar people. The meds that even us out deaden us in other ways. They make us “flat”. I’m not as flat as I’ve been in the past, thank heavens, but my personality is mostly gently rolling hills rather than valleys and mountains. Which is good. Too much up and down is bad, but it makes the scenery kind of boring.

Consequently I read a lot and watch a lot of tv and movies. Which are things I really enjoy, and doing enjoyable things is important when you’re mentally ill. I’m just not very active, which isn’t good. I’m old enough now (43) that my body’s activity will only continue to decline, and I’ll have to work damn hard, harder than I would have had to ten years ago, to regain strength that I’ve lost. That will be my big goal for 2015: to become more active, and to lose some of the extra weight I’ve put on. I’m all for body and fat acceptance, but I’m unhealthy. If I want to have a nice long life, I need to lose weight, and that’s that. It’s not as hard as one thinks, really. I just have to stop bingeing at night and cut down my carbs. That combined with a walk every day would get me to where I want to be, though it would take a long time. I know how to eat to be more healthy. I just need to do it.

Motivation is something else I want to work on this year along with creativity. They kind of go hand in hand. If I want to be motivated to get up every day, I need to have something to look forward to. I just need to find the kinds of creativity that will mesh with my mental capacity. I like building and fixing things. I also like putting things together, like beads and tiles. I’ve always wanted to get into fixing and refinishing furniture. Maybe that’s something I should afford myself the opportunity to do. Whatever I do, it has to battle the anhedonia that has slowly settled into my life over the last few years. It’s no longer an artifact of my mental illness: it’s just something I’ve grown used to.

I do have something that will give me a lot of motivation to get up in the morning, though it will be a few months before I can do it. I’m going back to school, after 14 years. I only need about 30 more credit hours in order to get my bachelor’s degree, so I’m going to finally finish it. It will take me a couple of years because I can only afford to take 2 classes at a time, but I’ll get there! And once I have a degree, my earning potential will really go up and I’ll be able to find real jobs. Now I just have to figure out what to major in. Once I pick it, I can’t change it again, because all I have left to take are major concentration classes. I also think the University has rules about how close to graduation you can change your major. I’d really like to major in microbiology, which was my absolute favorite subject when I was in school before. Whether or not that college will let me transfer in is in question. That’s the question for all of the potential colleges I may want to transfer into. I may just be stuck finishing a Religious Studies degree. Which I suppose wouldn’t be horrible. It’s what I call a “ditch digging” degree, though, because that’s about all it’s good for.

So I have that to look forward to. We also have some other potential big plans in the works, but we’ll have to talk about those later. 🙂 Let’s just say I think there are some big changes coming in the next few years. All for the good. For the first time in a long time, I’m really looking forward to seeing what the future holds.

Like this:

I have to change a lot of things about my life, and I don’t know how to do it.

Maybe I should back up. Last year I went to the hospital for chest pains, which were diagnosed as acid reflux (which is crap: I know what that feels like and that wasn’t acid reflux). About the only thing useful I left the hospital with was my cholesterol level and a clean cardiac stress test. After I went home I was determined to be healthier so I could lower my slightly elevated cholesterol level and lose the extra pounds I was carrying. And for a while I did pretty well. I stopped eating as many carbs, lost a few pounds, and was exercising almost every day, even if it was just a walk.

Then the same thing that always happens to me when I’m trying to keep habits going happened: something disrupted the flow of my activities and I never re-established them. In this particular case, it was the loss of one of our vehicles, so I could no longer go to karate class or yoga class at night. Did I do the right thing and just keep walking, lifting dumbbells, and going to the gym when the car was available? No, of course not. My progress was disrupted and I couldn’t get it going again. Then the holidays happened, beginning with Halloween. Gain five pounds. Thanksgiving. Gain five more pounds. Christmas. Five more pounds.

By that point, my eating habits were also disrupted and I had developed a nasty sugar addition. Unfortunately, I also suffer from bipolar disorder (and some other things), which means I’m anywhere from severely depressed to mildly melancholy just about all of the time. This makes it really hard to get the motivation to do things like exercise and eat healthy. Plus, I’m miserable when I feel like that so I want to make myself feel better, and one of the ways I do that is with food.

And so it has gone for nearly a year now. Before Halloween last year I weighed 203 pounds: today I weigh 239. My cholesterol is 207, slightly elevated. I also have borderline high blood sugar. I’m also in the grips of a profound apathy generated by my diseases and the drugs I take to deal with them. Really, I’m not sure what other obstacles I could possibly have to getting healthy, other than physical disabilities. It’s hard to think positively and come up with a plan for change when I’m halfway to miserable most of the time.

Unfortunately, all of the things that will make me feel better are the very things that my disease and drugs make it extremely difficult to do. Above anything else I could do for my health, I should exercise, preferably an hour a day, hard exercise (according to my shrink). If I want the effect of a good mood after a workout, I have to work my ASS off. My brain just doesn’t come by those happy chemicals easily like they do for everyone else. So it’s not just enough to get any old exercise: it has to be HARD, and I have to do it for a while. Which makes it even more difficult for me to want to get up and go do it. It’s difficult just to go on a walk.

The other thing I can do for my health that would have the greatest impact is changing my diet. Eating less and eating differently would make me lose weight and shave points off my cholesterol level, plus help regulate my blood sugar. It also helps regulate my mental health to be on a healthy diet free of unhealthy fats and sugars. If it was just me, this would be relatively easy. Unfortunately, it’s not just me: I have to take my family into consideration. I have a child who hates beans and only likes a very few vegetables, which means my primary non-animal source of protein isn’t available to me (I won’t cook two different meals, one for me and one for them, that’s insanity). I could just go ahead and cook what I’m going to cook and tell her she just has to deal with it, but then I have the mental stress of a food battle at every single meal. She’s 11: she doesn’t care that this is healthy and will make her live longer. Kids think they’ll live forever already: what the hell is a new diet going to do for them? She’ll just see it as a form of punishment, and every meal will be tinged with sadness and anger. Why the hell would I want that?

So on the one hand, I have to fight with myself, and on the other hand, I have to fight with my family. No matter where I turn, there’s a battle. I feel like I’m going to war with no army and everyone against me. I feel doomed to failure before I’ve even begun.

So here I am, stuck. Even if I didn’t have to fight with my family about food, I have no idea how to cook without basing every meal on meat. It’s just how I grew up: meat, starch, vegetable. I’ve had meals that were nothing but vegetables. They were tasty (sometimes) but I was hungry again an hour later. I honestly don’t know how people live like that. I also don’t know how people live eating the same meals every week, or sometimes every day. I have to have a LOT of recipes in my repertoire or else I get sick of eating things and wind up going out. There’s a plethora of food websites of every imaginable cuisine available on the internet, but you never really know if something’s going to be good until you try it. Which means I also have to have a known backup dinner available when we try new things, or else we just go out. It’s all a fuckload of work that makes me hate food and cooking, things I used to enjoy.

I know there must be a way out of this situation, but I feel blocked at every turn. And I’m very low on spoons. It makes all of the changes I need to make overwhelming: diet, exercise, sleep, vitamins, water, yoga, etc. The things I need to do to get better are the very things that being ill makes it hard to do. It’s a nasty negative feedback loop. But if I take things slow and small, and start with what’s easiest, maybe I can start to dig myself out of this rut. I didn’t lose all of my habits at once: I won’t be able to re-establish them all at once either. Now I just have to pick what to start with. What will give me spoons, and not take them away?

I’m really not enjoying life right now. Around the time that the cat died two weeks ago, I started having a recurrence of a strange breathing issue I have from time to time. It basically keeps me from being able to take a deep breath whenever I want to. It has its origins partially in my allergies, and partially in anxiety. I start having trouble because of the allergies, which makes me anxious, which makes the problem worse. I haven’t figured out how to make it go away yet. It just happens spontaneously.

Consequently, I’m getting really shitty sleep right now since I pretty much can’t lay down to sleep. Whatever this fuckuppery my lungs likes to play on me gets worse when I’m reclining. I’ve largely slept either in a recliner or on the couch the last two nights.

I don’t imagine the anxiety component is made any better by the fact that I’m on deathwatch with yet another cat. This time it’s YinYang’s mother, Babalon. Obviously, she’s a bit older than he was when he died a couple of weeks ago. She also looks much worse. She’s been sick for at least two years, is nothing but fur and bones, and looks like she has at least two paws in the grave. Her condition has grown much worse in the past few days and I’m fairly certain I’ll be sending another pet on its way to the Great Catnip Field in the Sky sooner rather than later. Because what I really need right now is to dig another hole in my back yard.

So between the dead and dying cats, my allergies, and my anxiety, my sleep is suffering. I believe the appropriate word to use to describe my current demeanor would be “punchy”. I really want nothing more than 8-12 hours of uninterrupted sleep. I would particularly like it to be uninterrupted by the need to suddenly sit upright to alleviate the sensation of suffocating. I’d love to induce sleep pharmaceutically, but my supply of appropriate meds is quite low due to the last dying cat incident and due to my psych nurse adjusting my scrip down without really discussing it with me (which is the first time he’s done something to annoy me).

All of which will be discussed at my appointment later today, along with the apparent necessity that I take a drug that costs $13 a pill (just my fucking luck: dozens of psychiatric medications at my disposal, and the one that works is the most recent in a new string of horribly expensive drugs that unfortunately do their job really well). I’ll be spending some time delving into the world of online pharmacies.

So no, I’m really not enjoying life at the moment. I want my cat back, and I want to breathe properly.

Like this:

A while back I wrote an entry called Cluelessabout my inability to tell when people like me and want to be my friend. It’s not that I don’t have a lot of friends, it’s just that in some part of my mind I assume they’re there merely out of habit rather than desire. Which the rest of me knows is just fucked up and somewhat insulting to the people who do call me their friend.

It came up again the other day when someone very stressed out by finals said that they missed spending time with me and my daughter, and I remember feeling somewhat surprised that someone actually missed me, other than my daughter and husband. I mean, if people are my friends, then of course they would miss me when I’m not around or if they haven’t been able to see me for a while. It would be stupid (and again, insulting) to assume otherwise.

I don’t know why I do this, really. Enough time has passed between now and when I was incredibly insecure in my early 20s that I think I shouldn’t feel this way any more. I have achieved what I had sought for so long: to have a stable and long-lived community of friends, something my parents were never able to maintain. They couldn’t help but to offend people eventually, and the people they didn’t offend were just as fucked up as they were.

I need to work on appreciating my own worth. I’ve solved many other of my baggage issues, which is a fucking miracle considering how much of it I was hauling around. Seriously, if mental baggage had to be carried in something physical, I would have occupied an entire FedEx 747. I’m down to a small two-engine plane these days: just a few bags. One of the last ones, though, is the one marked “Poor Self Esteem”, destination code SOL. That’s a tough one. I have a mantra that I tell myself when I think I suck:

“I cannot suck.I am surrounded by intelligent people who would
not spend time with someone who sucks.
Therefore, I cannot suck.”

It’s my personal Dune fear mantra (which is another fabulous one: I need to memorize it). I’ve told it to myself enough times that I think I suck much less than I used to, but it still needs tattooing on the inside of my eyelids, along with a Zen koan I recently read:

Let go or be dragged.

Amen. Perhaps I should see the baggage as being what’s in motion, rather than myself, and it’s dragging me along. Or flying the plane. That seems dangerous if I want to be mentally healthy. I wouldn’t let someone who’s delusional drive me around in a car: I shouldn’t let tenacious negative delusions drive my life.

Speaking of delusions, news on the headmeat front is fairly positive lately. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that the lithium went away last year (thank the gods) along with a couple of other meds that were causing skin and breathing problems (I like air, I’d like to have as much of it as possible, thank you very much). They were replaced by Lamictal and Ritalin, of all things. I used to think that disorders that “required” things like Ritalin were a bunch of trumped up hooey made up by teachers who just wanted a quiet classroom. I know differently now. Ritalin lets me focus and think. Without it, my mind meanders here and there, like that dog in “Up”.

“Squirrel!”

Recently I’ve added another: Saphris. Which unfortunately is incredibly expensive. Like $13 a pill (FUCK ME SIDEWAYS!!!), but unlike the other drugs in its class, it doesn’t cause severe sedation or weight gain (which is a misnomer: these drugs don’t cause weight gain, they cause uncontrollable munchies). Fortunately, it’s pretty new so the headmeat folks are still drowning in samples. If I can float on samples for another year, I’ll be able to actually afford it since we’ll be done paying off an old debt. And I’ll probably keep taking it, because it’s outstanding at shutting off the constant mental chatter and musical jukebox going on in my brain (you only think you know what an earworm is like). A good friend calls it the Mental Dinner Party. Sometimes the guests are all happy and enjoying their meal and conversation. Other times they’re really angry and are throwing dishes and wine glasses at each other. Or knives, if it’s a really bad day (those are just analogies: I do not throw things at people). Saphris makes everyone get along.

Don’t get me wrong, I still get angry. But it’s a normal-in-the-way-others-get-angry sort of thing. It’s hard to describe how to tell the difference between good angry and bad angry. It’s a mental quality that’s impossible to tell someone about unless they’ve experienced it. It’s the difference between being in control, and being out of control. And the latter is very frightening, let me tell you. I’ll take anything that puts a lid on that happy horseshit.

On that note, I’m going back to working on my spiritual journal. It’s the most fun I’ve had creatively in a very long time.

I spent some time today reading over the previous year’s worth of blog entries over at Tempest. I’m struck by how much better I feel compared to the way I was feeling when I wrote a lot of those entries. There was still a lot of up and down, and I wasn’t really on the right meds, so things weren’t improving as quickly as they might have.

It was interesting to see the range of emotions I went through over the last 16 months or so. At first I was desperate to stop whatever was wrong with my addled brain. Then I was relieved to finally have some kind of treatment. My next task was to bury myself in as much information about bipolar disease as possible. After a few weeks of that, I’d had enough and returned all of the books to the library. Quickly. By then I was resentful about having to deal with it at all, which wasn’t helped by not getting better as quickly as I had hoped. Then again, I was reminded of the many people on a bipolar forum I visit sometimes who had spent literally years finding the right med combo and then restabilizing. I’m not surprised it took so long for my own boat to level out and not be going up and down such large waves. You get a broken boat and probably sunk that way.

Then summer came. Gah. God I hope that never happens again. It’s one thing to deal with a drought, and it’s one thing to deal with a heat wave. To deal with them both at the same time is just pure and sheer misery. Just leaving the house is like a slap in the face with a hot blow dryer. Then everything started catching on fire, giving my lungs no end of grief. Having been through that, I was struck by a post almost exactly a year ago talking about how I was surveying my lovely, green garden, something that I’m doing again right now. It was an eerie moment of deja vu.

Later in the year, I finally got off the lithium along with a couple of other things, so I didn’t feel so “chemical”. My new meds are much better: Lamictal, aka lamotrigine, along with Neurontin, aka gabapentin. For some strange reason, anticonvulsant medications do wonders for bipolar illness. Go figure. I hope that I get to do what I want in the afterlife, which is just wander the Universe, coming back to Earth every now and then to see how humanity is progressing. It would be wonderful to see a time in the future when science has learned most of what there is to know about the human body, enabling them to be much more precise in how mental illness gets treated. Just as we see the treatment of mental illness a hundred years ago as barbaric, I imagine a similar attitude will be thought about this century’s method of treating mental illness. All we can do now is throw one drug after another at something, try to give a patient as much therapy as possible, and try to get someone to adhere to lifestyle changes that will also benefit their mental, and physical, health.

That last bit is the hardest, really. I have 40 years of habits under my belt that need undoing, and it’s going to be really difficult. A lot of these habits are comforting mechanisms I developed over time to deal with my stressful environments or general life misery. And I still find them comforting. I have much less need to escape from something dangerous or stressful, but it’s like wearing your favorite ratty, but comfortable, clothing around the house. Maybe you don’t need it for its purpose anymore, but damn they’re cozy. Woe betide the person who throws them away or takes them to Goodwill.

Well, like every other habit I’ve ever needed to change, I need to put a solid plan into place. It took me two months to lay out my quit smoking plan. It should take me at least that long to plan out the various life changes I still need to make in order to say I’m doing everything I can to mitigate my condition. Drugs only do so much. The rest has to come from things that I do myself. So far I haven’t been very good at that job. But last year was really hard for me and I spent most of my time and energy keeping my head above emotional water. Now the waves aren’t so high and the water isn’t as turbulent, so I don’t have to work so hard. In fact, it’s kind of pleasant here. Pleasant enough to feel like I can really get back to the task of living life as it’s meant to be lived. With ease.

Like this:

I’ve been neglecting my little blog here. It started as a way to explore my particular spiritual journey and then morphed into a venue to spew my thoughts about being diagnosed as bipolar. That was just over a year ago. Since then I’ve found a set of meds that really help but don’t cause any side effects, that I can tell. My job is more stable and steady now that I’m not having to essentially create it out of whole cloth (I’m the first official employee at my dojo: everything had been mostly done by our Sensei, who isn’t exactly thrilled about administrative work). I’m even (gasp!) saving money! I’ve been taking money out of each paycheck and stowing it in the savings account so that the next time something big comes along (like the terrible squealing noise my husband’s car is making) it won’t be a financial crisis.

Now that things in my life are a bit better, I’m trying to pick up the writing habit again. So I’ll be using 750 Words a lot more and posting what I write there, here, depending on the day’s topic. With a typing speed of 80-90wpm, 750 words only takes me about 15 minutes to write. I know I can make 15 minutes available every morning.

With that in mind, here are today’s words:

My hands and arms are a little sore today. I spent a couple of hours yesterday trimming the neighbor’s peach tree, pecan saplings, and Lady Banksia rosebush that were all intruding upon my yard and shading the grass so much that it died. I’m not quite done with the project, either: there are still several tendrils of the rosebush waaaaay up in the pecan saplings (I don’t know if I can still reasonably call them saplings if they’re 10-15′ high). I’ll try to finish that today, but I’ve noticed that now that I’m a little bit older, I can’t just launch myself into a project for days at a time, every day. I have to have at least a little rest. That could be because my fitness level isn’t what it should be right now, and I’m still quite overweight from last year’s spate with various medications.

Speaking of work and rest, I wish I knew why I can’t just pass out at the end of a day of hard work like other people seem able to. I can whack bushes all day long, but at night I’m still doing my usual routine of watching tv until I fall asleep around 1 or 2 in the morning. Which Reid tells me is a bad thing to do to my brain. I wish I didn’t like tv so much! I really like watching shows and movies, though I admit that I should probably watch less and read more. In fact, I just gave ‘read’ a point bump in Joe’s Goals so that I have more incentive to do just that. It’s not like I lack for books!

I’m considering doing something similar to the Julie & Julia blog, where I slowly go through ALL of my books and blog about each one when I’m finished with it (or chuck it aside in boredom). Obviously I won’t be reading a book a day (though in the absence of anything else to do, I can) and it will probably take me at least two years, if not a great deal more, to get through our entire collection. Some books I won’t care to read, like my husband’s Christianity books, but others I really do want to read. I have an astounding collection, compared to most, of spirituality books of a wide variety, not to mention several Stephen King books I have yet to read (bad fan!). During this time, I really should refrain from checking more than one book out from the library, and only when I really need a book on something that I don’t have in the house, which shouldn’t happen very often.

Something else I’ll be doing every day, hopefully, is writing about the Spiritual Nomad series I’m taking from my friend Sylvan. There are lots of assignments and projects to do, and we are encouraged to blog about them so she can link to them. So I’ll be trying to re-establish my writing habit that lithium killed, while expanding my spiritual horizons at the same time.

In the meantime, I still have a shitload of gardening to do. There’s the aforementioned tree trimming that needs to be completed, and the fence needs to be “shaved and topped” of the shrubbery that has grown out of control in the presence of too much sun, now that those giant trees behind our house are gone. 😦 I still have a whole garden bed to plant, and it’s going to be filled with the “three sisters”: the Native American tradition of planting corn, beans, and squash together. The corn goes in the middle with beans surrounding it, and then squash (or melons) around all that. There’s supposed to be a minimum of 4′ of space between each corn hill, which I have in one direction, but in the other it’s only 3′. I hope that’s not a problem later on.

The only thing I’m really worried about garden-wise is the wildlife. I have squirrels all day long, and then at night there are possums and raccoons. All of which are happy to divest me of my vegetables, usually before they’re even ripe, little fuckers. I’m trying to figure out how to protect the plants from the critters while still letting in the sun and making it easy for me to get to the plants. I think I’ll probably wind up going with the PVC-in-hoops method and get bird netting. I don’t want to block any sun to the beds, so shade cloth will obviously be too much. Though we’ll have to see how the summer pans out. If it’s too hot and dry, I may very well need shade cloth. Yay Texas!

Like this:

I underwent an experiment over the last few weeks. I tried to taper off my lithium, mostly because I didn’t like its side effects. Mostly things like big muscle twitching and vision impairment. It sucked not to be able to read a book, and it really sucked to be using a mouse and have my hand freak out and decide it needed to click things I didn’t want it to, or to bang the keyboard randomly. Riding a stationary bike? Straight out. Karate? Not much better.

Then there were the memory issues. I couldn’t remember a goddamned thing. I could watch an entire tv show and not remember anything about it. Fun times. Never mind tv shows, what about my life? My daughter? Memories are what make a human life. Without them, what’s the point of living? It was like I had gone full circle around suicide back to a place where I couldn’t see what the point of living was anymore. Something was terribly amiss. A quick check over at Crazy Boards told me I wasn’t on the wrong track: there were many people over there who absolutely refused to take lithium for the exact same reasons.

So I asked my psych nurse what to do and he suggested slowly tapering off until I was only on my other drug that is supposed to balance my moods, etc. So I did that, very slowly, over several weeks. I got crankier and crankier the closer I got to zero. 600mg seemed to be okay. I figured out that I really needed to take at least some dose of lithium when I had a couple of days that were just awful. I was terrible to the people I love most, and I felt horrible. I added lithium back in and took some Ativan to mitigate my horrible feelings and to make me sleep.

This really upset me. I had really wanted to be off that particular drug. It was a purely psychological reaction to have so many different things to take. I wanted to be off at least one of them, and if I could be off that one, maybe it meant I wasn’t so bipolar as we had all thought. But I was. I really was, or am. And I had to grapple mightily with my desire not to be like my mother, who was bipolar and an awful person.

But in a way, making that realization and staying on at least a small dose makes me NOT like her, because realizing she needed help and needed to stay on her meds was something that she could never do. She was always too proud to stay on them, telling herself that she could push through any trouble herself, she didn’t need any drugs’ or doctors’ help. And that clearly wasn’t true.

I have bipolar illness. I am not bipolar. That is, I have a disorder, rather than being the disorder. It’s tough to make that distinction. I imagine it is for other people as well, especially ones who really don’t know anything about it. And if I have this disorder, I must take my meds, just like a diabetic. Granted, I have far more medicines than the average diabetic, but we’re talking about the human brain here. It has a lot of convolutions, and if I need to take several meds in order to address those convolutions, well then so be it. I imagine those meds will change a lot over the years as we figure out what works and what doesn’t.

But what absolutely does NOT work is denial. I can’t tell myself that I can stop taking this stuff after a while. I’ll always have a little army of brown bottles that are my friends twice a day. I can’t escape that, not if I want a normal life. Other things may mitigate that little army, but they’ll always be there in some form.

Part of me is asking myself why in Heaven’s name I have chosen to write about these things in a public blog. After all, most folks with a mental illness don’t decide to wave their flag high and proud. They hide it as much as possible. That’s why: I’m not a hiding person when it comes to something important to me. And this particular important thing is subject to a lot of prejudice and misunderstanding. Perhaps waving my flag will help end that prejudice and misunderstanding that seems to be attached to bipolar, depression, mania, suicide, mental illness and its medications, so on and so forth. People speak freely of other physical maladies they suffer from: MS, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, cancer, etc. Why not these? Afraid we’re going to snap and go Hannibal Lecter on your ass? Not likely. So chill, and read, and hopefully learn something.

Breaaaaaathe. Seems simple until you can’t. About a week ago, I started having trouble taking a deep breath. I could take one about every 15 breaths or so, but the rest of the time, forget it. Coincidentally, it was the day after a great deal of smoke descended upon our fair city. Suddenly a problem that was restricted to the nighttime hours began bothering me in the daytime and did not respond to my usual methods of relieving it. Annoying does not cover it.

I went to one of the many urgent care centers that have popped up to relieve pressure on the emergency rooms and had a chest x-ray, a nebulizer treatment, and many questions asked of me. They said “reactive airway”. No, really? They also gave me a prescription for an albuterol inhaler, which does help, but only when I’m taking my usual anti-anxiety agent. Three days later, I went to an actual emergency room and got another x-ray which was as perfect as the first one. The doctor took note of my ease when taking an anti-anxiety agent and diagnosed dyspnea (shortness of breath: no, really?) and anxiety. The anxiolytic I take isn’t really good to take on a constant basis so I called my usual doc to get something else. All it does make it hard for me to work. Today I went for my third doctor visit, which wasn’t much more productive than the others. They did give me another albuterol prescription since the other one didn’t have any refills.

About $500 and none of them really had any answers. The best I can do is take an addictive anxiolytic and walk around the house in as meditative a manner as possible. That and use my inhaler. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I run out of my anxiolytic. I’ve missed 12 hours of work this week, important hours at that, which stresses me out. Stress and anxiety really do worsen my breathing, but I’m not really sure what to do about that.

Is this my final ringing bell to alert me that I’m way more tense than I need to be? It must be, because I want to burst into tears just thinking about these things. Am I really way more stressed out than I think I am? I must be, because my body is disrupting one of its primary functions. Breathing’s kind of important, y’know. We only get to live for about 5 minutes without air.

So I spent some time making a schedule of my regular life and then I added yoga classes to it, ones that are really close to my karate dojo. Like *really* close: in the same building and across from it. I can’t have any excuse for missing one now.

It’s more than yoga, though. It has to be an internal change. It doesn’t matter how much smoke is billowing out of Bastrop County (though that doesn’t do my lungs any good, that’s for sure). If I’m all tight, then the air won’t get it. This is a frightening process. Have you ever been without air? I want mine back. Right now.